LOUISVILLE 2011 - Day 2

Day 2 kicked off with discussions of "distributed being." Appropriate, given how distributed most of us who'd spent the previous evening dining at Proof were probably feeling. I went on being ontologically distributed throughout the day, making it possible for me, for the first time, to attend concurrent sessions, where I even occasionally concurred.

The final event of the day was a poetry reading by Rae Armantrout. After not having seen much of Rae the past few years, I now have seen her virtually every other week. At MLA I saw her read from The Grand Piano with her co-authors. At AWP I saw her interviewed at a conference session and reading with friends at the off-site events hosted by Rod Smith. At Louisville she read beautifully from past works, including the award-winning Versed, the newly published Money Shot and some poems in manuscript. Rae was ably introduced by the always already able Alan Golding, a distributed being of the best sort.

LOUISVILLE 2011 - Day One

This year we were spared the ice storm, but a killer rain ran through Louisville on the first day of the conference formerly known as the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference (now the unpronounceable "LCLC"). The opening keynote for 2011 was a poetry reading by Michael Heller. I first became aware of Heller when I read his critical study of Objectivist poetry, Conviction's Net of Branches. Finally got to know the man himself, and Jane (a fine poet herself) in Maine years ago in the

course of a mad bus trip through the fog.

Heller's reading was followed by two critical panels addressing his work, to all of which Michael responded graciously and with humor.

We all bussed over to the Muhammed Ali Center for the evening keynote, a rousing cultural studies reading of Jackie Robinson (with nods to Ali along the way) from Grant Farred. Grant edited the collection Rethinking C.L.R. James and is the author of What's My Name? among other works.


Then it was off to Proof Restaurant to celebrate with these delightful creatures.

CEDRIC ROBINSON at PENN STATE

Today Penn State was the beneficiary of a visit from Cedric Robinson, author of the classic Black Marxism and other works including Terms of Order, Black Movements and the Anthropology of Marxism.

Robinson's topic was the figure of the black detective and his paper centered on the early work in the evolution of the figure from Pauline Hopkins.

In the course of a careful analysis of the serial novel Hagar's Daughter, Robinson gave his listeners a grounding in such cultural phenomena as the Colored American Magazine and the career of Bert Williams.

After the Q & A, Robinson was presented with an award for his life's work from the African and African American Studies department.

A MIGHTY WIND

You think Wisconsin has it bad . . . Today the winds blowing through D.C. knocked down the national Christmas tree. My father, who has been photographing the tree for decades, took this shot of the workmen trying to put the tree back up. Hope they get it done before Congress shuts down the government.

(photo by Aldon D. Nielsen)

George Quasha's VERBAL PARADISE

"Preverbs precede themselves, so to speak, with hidden trapdoors," so writes George Quasha by way of prefacing his preverbial volume.

I hadn't seen new work from Quasha for quite some time, so it was a more than usually pleasant surprise to see this new book from Manuel Brito's Zasterele editions.

It made me think of Williams walking through the Paterson park and thinking of the Mexican artisan who had outprecedented himself. It made me think of an herbal paradise. It made me think of quashing presuppositions.

"Beings are marked by what you do.

My life is on this line.

Think right through."

Find out more about the book by clicking through to Quasha's preface here.

Nourbese Philip

Thanks to Muning for these shots of me with M. Nourbese Philip in Philadelphia.

TERRENCE HAYES

National Book Award winner Terrence Hayes drove over from Pittsburgh for a return poetry reading at Penn State last night. He agreed to take questions at the end and was indeed asked who his favorite poet might be. On the upside, the undergrads in the audience were seen taking copious notes (on paper! in handwriting!) and many of them lined up to buy books of their own accord.

POETRY IS COMING, TO THE AWP -- DAY III

Started out the last day with the panel in tribute to Lucille Clifton. My only previous experience of AWP had been a conference in Baltimore, where Lucille Clifton had been present to receive a panel full of tributes and to read from her work. This time the room was filled with friends, and I got the chance to tell Clifton's daughters that I had known their father in his Morgan State days. (For those of you who don't know Clifton's bio., her husband, Fred, was a philosopher and a wonderful teacher. I always wondered what that household must have been like, with a poet and a philosopher and their children.) Later I dropped in to a panel where writers were reading from their works related to D.C. itself, primarily so that I could hear my friend Ethelbert Miller.

That night it was on to THE REEF in Adams Morgan, just below Columbia Road, for the biggest poetry festival of the week, sponsored by Edge Books, Abraham Lincoln Magazine and West Wind Review. Tom Orange played a poem on a C Melody Sax only minutes after Mel Nichols took to the uke, or something like one; I do recall a capo in evidence. K-Lo, who said she'd never answer to that name, did. The whole thing will appear over at Penn Sound before too long. Hope you enjoy it as much as we all did.

God, it was good to be back in D.C.